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Editorial: Take joy in simple pleasures

Posted: August 6, 2011 - 11:14pm

Savannah

The Heirloom Tomato Festival on Saturday in Old Town got us thinking a little bit. Not about what it offered — juicy vine-ripened tomatoes — but about what it didn’t offer: bland, grainy tomatoes you might see withering away under misters at the grocery.

You never really consider the artificiality of something until you get a taste of the real thing.

That tomato you buy at the store is picked while it’s still green, before the plant has a chance to fill it with the natural sugars that give it flavor. It’s then gassed with ethylene, which sounds horrifying but is actually just the plant’s natural ripening hormone. Still, why go through all that effort to replicate a process that nature has already perfected?

The answer is a slight thickening of the profit margin for the tomato company.

But the result is an artificial, flavorless mockery of tomatoes everywhere.

And not to cause too much alarm, but it’s not just tomatoes.

Commercial salmon farms serve ground up fish as food for the other fish, spiking their mercury levels. If you can find one with a relatively low level of mercury, you’re still ingesting dioxins, compounds in the body fat of animals that have been linked to endocrine-related conditions, developmental problems and susceptibility to cancer.

So, what’s the big deal? Just go organic and you’re fine right? Not so fast.

Phthalates are a helpful little compound for plastics manufacturers to give some pliability to stuff like plastic wrap. It’s helpful, right up to the minute where that plastic wrap gets put around your food and starts leaching out.

The Institute of Environmental Decisions along with the Institute of Chemistry and Bioengineering at ETH Zurich decided to investigate who was consuming this pollutant the most. The answer? A group the scientists determined “ate healthy, consciously and naturally.”

Why did the health nuts consume the most of this toxin? The study didn’t venture a guess, and we’re scared to ask.

We’re not trying to moralize or to get everyone to go vegan (no one loves some barbecue like we do), we’re just trying to emphasize what a joy it can be when you get down to the simple pleasures.

A seed goes in the ground, it’s coaxed upward by sunlight and water, and it produces a tomato. A sweet, luscious tomato. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.